Fantastique
Ajyal Film Club - Doha Film Festival 2025
Marjolijn Prins / Belgium, France, Netherlands / 2025 / 71 min / Colour / DCP / In French, Susu / Arabic, English subtitles
Themes: Documentary, Hybrid
Rated: 
Parental guidance is advised for viewers under the age of 15. Individuals under the age of 15 are not admitted into cinemas unless accompanied by an individual aged 18 or over.
Dates And Timings
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Sat, Nov 22 - 5:30 PM
Vox Cinemas, Doha Festival City, Screen 6- Fee: 50 QAR
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Wed, Nov 26 - 9:00 AM
Katara Building 16, Opera House- Fee: 0 QAR
Description
A gifted teenager trains as a contortionist with a local troupe while caring for her ill mother and trying to keep pace at school. She is one of the only girls in the group; as the next big tour draws closer, so does the pull of expectation. What begins as a straightforward observational portrait becomes a richer exploration of how emancipation actually happens through effort, hesitation and the courage to ask whether a dream is truly one’s own. The film addresses that question patiently, allowing doubt, discipline, and desire to coexist.
Hybrid in form, the work reflects a world where fantasy and reality often intertwine. Magic-realist touches are less escape than translation, visual ways of expressing how bravery is imagined before it is lived. Rather than declaring empowerment, the film shows it: a body learning strength; a young woman developing; a family negotiating what is possible. Amid pressures of tradition, economics and social structures, the girl’s resolve is tested. She learns to hold competing truths: responsibility and ambition, family care and personal agency. What endures is not a single triumph but a growing capacity to decide, to refuse or to leap, and to carry the consequences with grace.
Director
Marjolijn Prins
Marjolijn Prins is a documentary filmmaker with a background in fine arts. While studying, she explored directing life like fiction—an experiment that led her to embrace documentary’s embrace of failure and the unexpected. She graduated cum laude from RITCS (Brussels) in 2016; her graduation film ‘Mum, Me and the House’ won multiple awards, including the Jury Award at the London International Documentary Festival. She co-directed the web series ‘Hairy Heroes’ (2020/2021) and the short documentary ‘Paper Borders’ (2022).
Credits
- Producer
- Ellen De Waele, Mirna Everhard
- Cinematographer
- Johan Legraie
- Editor
- Ciska Slowack